housand
recruits from Macedonia, and reduced the neighboring people to
subjection. In 327 he crossed the Indus, vanquished Porus in a pitched
battle, took him prisoner, and treated him as a king. He contemplated
passing the Ganges, but his army refused. He sailed down the Indus, in
the year 326, with eight hundred vessels; having arrived at the ocean,
he sent Nearchus with a fleet to run along the coasts of the Indian
Ocean and the Persian Gulf as far as the mouth of the Euphrates. In 325
he took sixty days in crossing from Gedrosia, entered Keramania,
returned to Pasargada, Persepolis, and Susa, and married Statira, the
daughter of Darius. In 324 he marched once more to the north, passed
Echatana, and terminated his career at Babylon."

The enduring importance of Alexander's conquests is to be estimated, not
by the duration of his own life and empire, or even by the duration of
the kingdoms which his generals after his death formed out of the
fragments of that mighty dominion. In every region of the world that he
traversed, Alexander planted Greek settlements and founded cities, in
the populations of which the Greek element at once asserted its
predominance. Among his successors, the Seleucidae and the Ptolemies
imitated their great captain in blending schemes of civilization, of
commercial intercourse, and of literary and scientific research with all
their enterprises of military aggrandizement and with all their systems
of civil administration.

Such was the ascendency of the Greek genius, so wonderfully
comprehensive and assimilating was the cultivation which it introduced,
that, within thirty years after Alexander crossed the Hellespont, the
Greek language was spoken in every country from the shores of the AEgean
to the Indus, and also throughout Egypt--not, indeed, wholly to the
extirpation of the native dialects, but it became the language of every
court, of all literature, of every judicial and political function, and
formed a medium of communication among the many myriads of mankind
inhabiting these large portions of the Old World.

Throughout Asia Minor, Syria, and Egypt the Hellenic character that was
thus imparted remained in full vigor down to the time of the Mahometan
conquests. The infinite value of this to humanity in the highest and
holiest point of view has often been pointed out, and the workings of
the finger of Providence have been gratefully recognized by those who
have observed how the early gr